Someone made nearly ₹1,300 crore in a single month by investing in Ethereum

Your salary SMS doesn't look so impressive now, does it?

The story of Löb Strauß (better known through his company eponymous with his anglicised name ‘Levi Strauss’) is now commonplace on the internet’s dime-a-dozen ‘inspirational stories’ pages. When the Californian gold rush was at its peak, Strauss migrated to America and made more money than any gold-digger by selling the miners rugged jeans and other dry goods. So, why are we talking about Levi Strauss again? Because, there’s a ‘gold’ rush going on right now on the internet and there’s talk of an investor who’s made millions off it by investing in ‘silver’. We’re talking about the Bitcoin craze here. Remember how we told you that you could potentially make millions investing in it? Turns out we now do have a case study after all. An unnamed investor (who’s a bit shy about his identity) just made over $200 million investing, not in Bitcoin, but in its lesser valued competitor – Ethereum and its crypto-currency Ether. And here’s the best part – he made that sum in as little as a month’s time.

Now, if you’re wondering what Ether exactly is, here’s the story we did on it that could help:

The investor, who was already a millionaire, took a gamble on Ethereum after it rose in value at speeds higher than Bitcoin and apparently put in a cool $55 million on it. Thanks to its remarkable growth, partly fuelled by the increased demand for Bitcoin, the investor has more than quadrupled his net worth (that’s a growth of 415 per cent). While we don’t really know who exactly the person is (it could even be a collective of persons pooling funds to invest in it), an account on Instagram claiming to be the investor (or several) recently wrote this: “I get many private messages asking how much ether I have. One of the cool things about Ethereum is that all wallets around the world are transparent and open for everyone to see. And this is my wallet’s savings.”

What’s making this possible?

To put it simply, blockchain and its related crypto-currencies are no longer a fringe market. It’s the real deal. A ready reckoner in this case (or in the case of any market, for that matter) is its size. According to several analysts, the blockchain market (including Ether, Bitcoin and all other blockchain-related products and services) is now worth a mind-boggling $100 billion. That’s more than the economies of most countries on the planet. While Ether constitutes only a small part of this, it’s also one of the fastest growing blockchain-based entities.

You might be thinking that the anonymous investor is probably one of the early adopters who took a huge gamble. Well, if you had taken our advice when we told you about Ether exactly a month ago, you could be four times richer too. But that’s just from the most recent surge in Ethereum and the 400 per cent growth looks almost meek compared to the over 5,000 per cent growth that Ethereum had in value in the first six months of 2017. So had the investor put in the same amount of money on 1 January, 2017 – he might have made a mind-numbing $2.7 billion.

End of the line?

If the anonymous investor’s case has finally made you rethink your investment choices – it would be best to tread with caution at this point. Because as of this week, Ethereum took a mild tumble from its record-breaking high (of over $400) and plummeted below $200 to $194 per unit. This has reinforced warnings from various analysts that the Ethereum case might just be a giant internet bubble that could burst at any point. However, while Ethereum has become increasingly hard to mine and acquire owing to paucity, it might serve one well to look at the recent tumble in conjunction with its overall rise, in which context it’s meagre.